Walk through most seed shops today and the regular section is the shelf at the back: shorter every year, marked lower than the feminized packs beside it, and bought by a shrinking number of people who understand exactly what they are after. It is tempting to read that as obsolescence. It is nearer to the truth to read it as a library shrinking while the bookshop next door grows. Every female-only line began as a regular one, every new cross needs a male somewhere in its history, and the diversity of cannabis genetics that survives at all exists only because someone held onto regular seed. Specialists such as https://breederregularseeds.com carry lines going back to the 1980s, offered in packs of 10 seeds since a pack is meant to be a population, not a single plant. This article makes the argument for that unfashionable pack: what the male contributes, what a buyer gives up by never seeing one, and how to work with a population instead of a copy.
What a Male Plant Is Actually For
The easy account of a male cannabis plant is “a pollen source”, and for a flower grower that is the whole of it. For a breeder it is half the genome of every seed that follows, and that half is chosen with the same care as the mother.
A male contributes structure, vigour, maturation time, tolerance to mould and pests, trichome density and the aromatic chemistry exactly as the female does; it simply expresses several of those traits less since it does not produce a finished flower. Breeders who work with regular seed invest at least as much time choosing males as females, and this is the work that a feminized line inherits and can never repeat. Reversing a female gives pollen; it does not give a different line of selected traits.
How Diversity Leaks Away
Much of the feminized market is made from S1 seeds: a single famous clone, reversed and pollinated with itself. Every round of that selfing cuts in half the remaining genetic diversity, and after two generations what remains is close to one plant expressed across slightly different ways.
This is acceptable for a consumer who wants that one plant. It is a problem for everyone who comes after. Recessive weaknesses surface: intersex tendencies, weak stems, susceptibility to one particular mould. Traits that existed in the parent line but not in the selected clone disappear out of the gene pool altogether. A generation of such breeding leaves a market full with versions of a dozen clones, and a breeder trying to create something different discovers there is little remaining to work with. Regular seed from a true outcrossed line is the reservoir that refills the market, and it only persist if somebody grows it.
How to Judge a Male
Articles on selecting females are easy to find; guidance on picking males is scarce, because most growers never keep one long enough to judge. For a grower producing seed, these are the signs breeders watch for.
- Stability. Any male that also forms female flowers under ordinary conditions is discarded without exception; that tendency is the one thing anyone wants breeding forward.
- Structure. Short internodes, a strong central stem and a frame that matches the desired female shape are passed on; a stretched, floppy male passes that on too.
- Resin on the stem. Rub a stem or a pollen cluster and smell it. A male with resin on its sepals and a clear scent suggests it carries the resin genes worth passing on.
- Restraint. Males that dump huge quantities of pollen all at once are often the less desirable genetically; many breeders favour moderate producers.
Thinking in Numbers
The mistake first-time regular-seed growers make is seeing a pack as 10 chances at the one plant. It is nothing of the kind. A pack from a genuine outcrossed line is a sample of a population, and the point of running it is to see the spread and choose from it.
About half the plants will be male, so a pack of 10 seeds yields something like five females to compare and five males to discard or assess for breeding. Within the females, expect real differences: height, flowering time, smell, density, resistance. That spread is not a flaw in the seed; it is what the seed is selling. The grower who takes cuttings from the best female and the best male has something a feminized pack can never offer: a pair of chosen parents that are theirs.
From One Pack to the Next
Owning selected parents is only worth something if making the next generation, and here the options open up. Three approaches account for most of what small-scale breeders do.
- Selected cross. One chosen male on one or several picked females, everything else culled. The offspring carry the qualities of two selected plants and show narrower spread than the original pack. Repeated over generations with stable choices, this is how a new line is built.
- Backcross. Take a selected seedling again to one of its parents to fix a particular quality. It narrows the genetics quickly and is useful when one plant shows something worth concentrating and the other contributed mostly vigour.
- Open pollination. Let each male reach every female. It preserves the whole diversity of the line, makes a generous volume of seed, and does no choosing at all. This is how traditional lines are kept alive, and it is the right approach when the goal is preservation not improvement.
All three need nothing more than a isolated space for the male, a paintbrush or a small bag, and patience. None of them needs the chemical reversal that feminized production does.
The Seeds That Only Exist as Regulars
A number of lines have never been feminized and likely never will be: landraces collected from regions where cannabis grew over centuries, and heirloom hybrids from the first decades of indoor breeding. They are sold as regular seed since the people maintaining them treat the population as the whole point, and selfing a single plant would erase exactly what makes the line worth the trouble of keeping.
Growing a landrace from regular seed is different from growing a modern hybrid. Expect large variation, long flowering times in equatorial lines, lanky plants, and traits that made sense in a mountain valley but not under a tent. There will be also flavours and effects that no longer exist in the hybrid market anywhere. Breeder Regular Seeds keeps a separate landrace and heirloom section, with each line labelled with its origin of origin and the generation it has been grown out since the original collection.
Who Should Not Buy Regular Seeds
Nothing of the above makes regular seed into the right option for everyone, and pretending otherwise does the product no favours.
A grower with space for a handful of plants who needs each one of them to flower is far better served with feminized seed. The same is anyone who cannot afford to inspect the plants each day during the onset of flower, since a missed male in a small space seeds everything inside days. Someone running a single autoflower on a balcony gets no value from a pack they cannot choose from. And a buyer who wants a known clone-only plant reproduced as closely as possible is better off looking for a feminized S1, not a two-parent cross. Regular seed is for the grower who intends to choose, to keep and eventually to make something of their own; for everyone else the back shelf is best ignored alone.
Before You Buy
Breeder Regular Seeds dispatches each order in plain packaging with the breeder’s packs intact inside and nothing on the outside to reveal the contents. Orders to the United States are not accepted, as seed import is not permitted there. Seed law varies widely by country: in a good number of places owning seeds is lawful as collectables while germinating them is not, and in others the two are permitted under local rules or neither is. Checking the rules in your own jurisdiction is the buyer’s responsibility, and nothing of this article should be read as legal advice.
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